Trivia / Joanna Newsom

• Bury Your Art: A music video for "Good Intentions Paving Co." was made, but Newsom didn't like how it turned out so it was never released.
• Corpsing: In an April 2, 2016, performance in Salt Lake City that has been bootlegged in soundboard quality, one of Joanna's strings broke, so she had to interrupt the show for a few minutes to change it. The new string kept going out of tune while it was being broken in, and a dissonant note in a performance of "Emily" caused her to crack up audibly. (She also apologizes at the end of the song for skipping two verses, noting that she'd been distracted by trying to think of a way mid-song to avoid using the dissonant string).
• Creator Couple: While she and Andy Samberg are both musicians, this is arguably an averted trope. He's said (paraphrased) that he has no intention of collaborating with Joanna, because her fans would probably kill him. Her previous relationship with Bill Callahan was a straighter example; he sang backup vocals on Ys and she performed piano on A River Ain't Too Much to Love.
  • However, she did appear in two The Lonely Island songs, doing backup vocals.
• Cut Song: "Make Hay," which didn't make onto the official version of Divers.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: She hasn't released a live album yet, but several live performances have been recorded, many at soundboard quality, and are floating around the Internet.
• Sampled Up: "The Book of Right-On" was sampled on "Right On" by The Roots.
• She Also Did:
  • She recently began an acting career, with her first major role being the narrator in Inherent Vice. She's also made an appearance As Herself on Portlandia. She also made a cameo appearance in the finale of her husband's series Brooklyn Nine-Nine as a cello player.
  • She played harp on "If I Were" by Vashti Bunyan.
• Working Title:
  • Early versions of "Only Skin" were titled "Be a Woman" and/or "Blessing All The Birds." The latter comes from a line she ultimately cut: "Blessing all the birds that died so that I could live."
  • "Divers" and "Sapokanikan" were tentatively titled "The Diver's Wife" and "Look and Despair."